coffee roasters

If you roast coffee, Rob Hoos likely needs no introduction. His book, Modulating the Flavor Profile of Coffee, and articles in Roast Magazine have been a lodestar for many aspiring roasters. We caught up with the Portland-based roasting guru to find out what roasters are overrated, what mistakes most roasters are making, and what’s in his cup.

When I think about books about coffee roasting, yours is one of 2-3 that come to mind. What inspired you to write the book?

First of all, you’re kind to think of me in that way. To be fair, it seems like there are only 2-3 books out there! I was mostly inspired to write the book because of the lack of readily available information out there about coffee roasting. I come from a barista background, and seeing how much there was (even early on) related to brewing, extraction, and just really every element of being a barista was set in harsh contrast to the relative silence between roasters. When I originally started working on the experiments that became the basis for the book in 2011 (ish) my goal was to bring much of the openness and collaborative spirit that I had loved and appreciated from the barista side over to the roasting. This paired with the realization that part of what I wanted the roasting community to be sharing (profiling for flavor) wasn’t being shared because it was novel information. The reason for calling it a manifesto is because I didn’t want to be claiming to be the end-all-be-all of roasting, but to establish my observations and the changes I’ve seen in flavor due to roast profile changes….

You might might say 2015 has been the year of Revelator. Technically, the Birmingham-based company opened their first café at the end of 2014, but in a span of less than 12 months Revelator Coffee has opened five cafes in as many cities- with a sixth one on the way. We’ve long considered Nashville the South’s coffee capital, so we weren’t surprised that Revelator picked Music City as the site of their fifth café….

Coffee producing countries are beginning to roast and serve craft coffee. We recently came across an exciting new roastery in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic that is introducing specialty coffee to the Caribbean nation. As we learned more we became intrigued by Coral and Edouard, the wife and husband team behindGente de la Isla. Naturally, we felt an interview was in order.

Tell us a little bit about Gente de la Isla. Who are you? What do you do?

Gente de la Isla is a specialty coffee roastery. We also bake our all natural granola and are currently working on developing other breakfast products. Everything is hand made by a small team of 4. We distribute our products via our online store and through 15 small resellers in Santo Domingo. We organize tastings and coffee tasting workshops.

There’s an old idiom—“When it all goes south…”—that is commonly used to describe something that is declining in value or quality. One could justifiably argue that the state of Southern coffee roasters has “gone south.”

Now, I’m a Chicagoan and, to me, everything below Interstate 80 is “the South;” but, with this piece, I’m going to try to redeem that old expression.

While the West coast and major metropolitan areas like Chicago and New York City have been engulfed by specialty coffee, the “third wave” is also slowly “going south.” Southern states—collectively, even—may not have the sheer quantity of critically acclaimed and nationally renown specialty coffee roasters that, say, Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco have, there are several operations that definitely stand out.